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The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) offers prospective founders a number of funding programs for implementing their startup ideas. An important instrument is the EXIST Business Start-up Grant, which supports startup projects from an early stage. The funding is directed toward students, graduates, and scientists from universities and non-university research institutions. Within one year, the teams receive the opportunity to turn their first idea into a concrete business model, including a business plan, and to receive professional assistance in doing so.

Three KIT teams didn’t miss out on this chance and applied for the grant – successfully! The founders of Aquaplot, Curafida, and Selfbits were able to gain support with their innovative and technology-oriented ideas and, thus, received the EXIST Business Start-up Grant. The KIT Innovation Department actively helped in preparing applications. The Aquaplot team develops a software as a service solution for navigating and planning routes for maritime and cargo traffic. The team of Curafida also offers a SaaS application. Their system for health services is intended to bring chronically ill patients and their medical specialist closer together and to improve the flow of information. The third team, Selfbits, is working on a cloud-based service in the field of knowledge management / knowledge acquisition.

During the course of the year-long funding period, the teams can continue advancing their startup plans. In doing so, the prospective founders are supported through seminars and coaching. The goal is to prepare them for market entry through the technical and entrepreneurial realization of the idea. The task of the founders is to improve their business plan – the final business plan is the conclusion of the grant support. We look forward to seeing the development of the three KIT teams and wish them a lot of success!

The company Falquez, Pantle und Pritz GbR offers software-as-a-service for flow and noise prognoses in technical device development. With the help of the cloud-based platform NUBERISIM, complex high performance simulations can be driven and operated easily via browser. Therefore, potential sources of noise are found as early as product development and measures for noise minimization can be taken early on. In an interview, we asked Dr. Iris Pantle about the idea, the startup time, and the future prospects.

With its Software-as-a-Service products, PriceNow supports online retailers with existing customer marketing and social media marketing. Customer newsletters and postings can be automatically filled with personalized product and discount recommendations. PriceNow hereby develops and uses the latest machine learning algorithms. Product preferences and price sensitivity of the customer can be determined based on the existing customer data from online retailers. We interviewed Steffen Haak on the idea behind PriceNow UG, its founding period, and future prospects.